I decide to make the collage from photos of flowers, plants and trees, to represent the feeling of things growing in summer. Most of the pictures I used were taken in my mom’s gardens in Anchorage during the summer months. I got out my old hard drive and started searching through photos for the colors I needed. It was a fun test of my computer’s resources because I had thumbnails of about 4000 photos open at once, and Adobe Bridge, and about 30 photos in PS at one time. It was the easiest way to go through them and find the colors I needed. I’m happy to say the computer lived up to the challenge. I made folders for each color in my triad and the compliment color, and then copied the respective photos into each folder as I found them.

I’m not going to detail everything I did in Photoshop since that’s the realm of our other class. Suffice it to say this was another learning experience. Starting out, I knew what I wanted to do in my mind; I just wasn’t sure how to do it in PS. Many of the techniques we’ve learned so far came in handy and I Googled for what I didn’t know.

I did one color at a time, working from left to right. Green turned out to be the hardest to do which surprised me. I think it’s because most of the green in my pictures was background, and the orange and purples were foreground shots. Which each color section, I used a contrast of saturations, positioning the photos so that they gave an overall representation of one color. In other words, I wanted the differences in saturation to add contrast, but also to give the feeling of one overall color.

For the text I went back to dafont.com looking for something that felt like summer. I ended up choosing a font called “Pokemon,” for its casual feel and round edges. It felt like summer to me. Although I had decided on red as my accent I tested out blue and yellow just to see how they would look (Red, yellow, and blue being the complementary contrast triad to orange, purple, and green). In the end I though red offered the best complimentary contrast, and provided the boldness I was going for.

Doing the text portion of the composition really emphasized the importance of color relationships. I had to adjust the red color after moving it to the collage, so that I could see how it worked with the other colors. The adjustments I made while it was in a separate file didn’t work, because I couldn’t see how it related to the colors of the collage. The text was the only color I adjusted. The rest of the photos I left as shot. I really enjoyed this project, and I gained a much better understanding of color theory and interaction. I’ve had a sense before that something works, or looks good together, now I better understand the reasons why.

(I will add that once again the red in 'Summer' looks brilliant on my desktop monitor, and pretty blah on my laptop.)

I've created some variations to my collage, experimenting with different text effects and placement. On the one below I added a drop shadow to make the lettering stand out more, and move the text to the lower right corner to add more contrast.

I tried a lot of different fonts with nothing that I felt worked very well. I must have gone through a couple hundred on dafont.com and I downloaded about 10 which I tested.  I'm almost at this point ready to leave the text out of it completely.  Here's another variation, this one has no drop shadow, but I did use a black outline.